Here’s an interesting commentary from Nancy Walton at the Research Ethics Blog (Research integrity and principal-agent theory), about the application of principal-agent theory to thinking about motivating certain behaviours. The connection to COI, and its management, would be interesting to think about…
Well, I’ve just switched over from Blogger to WordPress, as this new platform (which I recently setup with my other blog, Genethics.ca) gives me a lot more flexibility in structure and maitenance.
See this story (Brian Deer, not a complainant) which further muddies (or clears?) the waters, about Brian Deer and the GMC inquiry into Andrew Wakefield which I commented on previously.
So now it looks like Brian Deer was not in a journalistic COI, as has been suggested. Just goes to show how complex and heated these issues can be…
A recent flurry of news stories about Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who in a 1998 Lancet paper proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, has raised numerous research ethics issues about data forgery, impact on public health, etc. See for example, the Bioethics Blog entry The Data Fake That Set the World Afire and this story by the UK Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism.
But as noted by my friend Chris MacDonald, author of the much acclaimed Business Ethics blog (#81 on EthicSphere’s 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics 2008), there’s more to this story then medical malfeasance and science fraud.
The following article from the Spectator, The witch-hunt against Andrew Wakefield, raises questions about the integrity and conduct of the Times journalist, Brian Deer, who has been actively following (and even leading) the case against Dr Wakefield.
“Last weekend, the paper published a two-page ‘investigation’ and a front-page spin-off story alleging that ‘Deer claimed that his ‘investigation’ was confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council’
What the Sunday Times did not report was that the GMC investigation into Wakefield was triggered by a complaint from… Brian Deer, who furnished the allegations against him four years ago. He has thus been reporting upon the hearing into his own complaint. Since when has a reputable paper published a story by a reporter who is actually part of that story himself – without saying so – and who uses information arising from the disciplinary hearing which he himself has instigated and which is investigating allegations he himself made in the first place?”
To quote Chris MacDonald,
There’s sometimes a fine line between reporting the news, and actually being involved in making the news that one then reports…
P.S.: See this great blog entry by Nancy Walton, over at the Research Ethics Blog, on what’s actually missing from the debate about autism and MMR. The Wakefield story and the need for clarity
Following up on a story I linked too back in December about the University of Minnesota and updates to its COI policy, things seem to have taken an interesting twist. The Dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Deborah Powell, in charge of developing the new policy is charged with
Apparently the most demanding elements of the draft policy have been removed. Of note,
Powell also rejected the task force’s recommendation to eliminate the level at which Medical School faculty and staff would be required to disclose financial relationships with industry. Powell recommended lowering the school’s current $10,000 threshold to $500, while the task force sought to do away with it all together.
It looks like Minnesota is missing an opportunity to implement coherent and robust COI guidelines…a pity.